Isn't the fact that these are curated make them not "pure AI"? A human in the loop applied "their" design aesthetic to the selection process.

Didn't humans make AI?

This is a very new area where law has not caught up. Surely in any creative process (book author, painter) there is a process where the artist selects and omits elements before the final product.

Is not the selection and omission of poorly generated images the "human authorship" [1] necessary to qualify? Or can OP modify AI generated art meaningfully to qualify for copyright?

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/us-copyright-offic...

Additionally the choice of the model is an important choice too. Some AI art collections even make their own derivative models where a human picks extra images to train off of.

It reminds me of 3D art where there is a lot of up front work in making models, textures, armatures, and shaders. You send a ton of data to the GPU and it spits out a rendered image or more likely a tile of one.